Lightning growth: Google teams up with WordPress to develop an accelerated ecosystem

Google recently has partnered with one of the biggest open-source content management systems (CMS), WordPress. WordPress, with a market share of nearing 59% and an estimated 1/3 of the entire web content published through their platform, is a definite leader in content management.

This partnership comes in line with Google’s continuous improvements on speed over the past 8 years. Google’s latest Speed update, that will roll out in July 2018, will use mobile page speed as a ranking factor in mobile search results. This will drastically impact websites online as it has been proven that most searched today are performed on mobile devices.

With about 59 percent of the CMS market share under them, equating to 29% of all websites worldwide, partnering with the WordPress platform makes perfect sense for Google to advance its goals of a stronger and faster web experience.

Google recently participated at WordCamp US, the largest of the WordPress developer events. Their goal was to engage with the WordPress community to understand and start a discussion around the performance of the WordPress ecosystem. Google shared data that highlighted the core problem of WordPress: its poor performance in speed and page load when compared with other non-WordPress-based sites, and their plan to work alongside WordPress, with a dedicated team, to advance the overall performance of the WordPress platform.

For anyone who has ever worked on or developed a WordPress-based website, including me, it is no secret that the open-source platform has struggled for years with code bloat, security, and performance. Though they have showed significant improvement in their core code in the last few years; overall, WordPress pages still lag behind non-WordPress pages on several performance indicators.

How Google will work with WordPress

Google has announced an expansion of their team, post the partnership, that will include a team that will be exclusive to WordPress. This team will work on advancing the platform’s performance and on bringing the platform’s ecosystem up to current web experience standards more rapidly.

Let’s hope that this collaboration makes working on the world’s biggest and most used content management system smoother, and improves web visibility for WordPress users like you and me.